It's been nearly twenty years since Linus Torvalds let loose Linux on an unsuspecting world, and on July 22 he finally updated the open source OS kernel to version 3.0.
Total Torvalds has integrated over 9,800 changes to Linux 3.0, the last of which 2200 were mainly corrections. As is usually two thirds of all new or updated driver changes.
Summary:
Besides a new version numbering scheme, Linux 3.0 also has several new features: Btrfs data scrubbing and automatic defragmentation, XEN Dom0 support, unprivileged ICMP_ECHO, wake on WLAN, Berkeley Packet Filter JIT filtering, a memcached-like system for the page cache, a sendmmsg() syscall that batches sendmsg() calls and setns(), a syscall that allows better handling of light virtualization systems such as containers. New hardware support has been added: for example, Microsoft Kinect, AMD Llano Fusion APUs, Intel iwlwifi 105 and 135, Intel C600 serial-attached-scsi controller, Ralink RT5370 USB, several Realtek RTL81xx devices or the Apple iSight webcam. Many other drivers and small improvements have been added.
Installing Linux Kernel 3.0 on Ubuntu 11.04:
Download the following deb files from : http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.0-oneiric/
inux-headers-3.0.0-0300_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_all.deb
linux-headers-3.0.0-0300-generic_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_i386.deb
linux-image-3.0.0-0300-generic_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_i386.deb
Open up the terminal and type following command to install above deb files (here order of installation is VERY important)
sudo dpkg -i linux-headers-3.0.0-0300_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_all.deb linux-headers-3.0.0-0300-generic_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_i386.deb linux-image-3.0.0-0300-generic_3.0.0-0300.201107220917_i386.deb
And, make sure you see something like ...
Once installation finish, reboot and and you should see new entry for Linux Kernel 3.0. Just select to boot it. If you get into problems with this kernel, reboot and select to boot into previous working Linux kernel and remove linux-headers-3 and linux-image-3 using synaptic-package-manager.
